In Nicaragua 1990, "the voters chose a candidate of Washington's choice with a "gun held to their heads"

During the run up to Nicaragua's elections in 1990, the Bush administration continued the strategy of trying to terrorize the population into "throwing the (popular) government out themselves" so the terror would stop.

The policy of keeping the contras alive, through so-called "humanitarian" or non-lethal aid, sustains a force that has shown itself incapable of operating without consistently committing gross abuses in violation of the laws of war.

The policy also has placed in jeopardy the holding of elections by encouraging contra attacks on the electoral process. Thus, while the Bush administration proclaims its support for human rights and free and fair elections in Nicaragua, it persists in sabotaging both.

The State Department statement would do credit to George Orwell's Ministry of Truth. It would be interesting to know, however, whether it considers how its theory that a cooperative has a "dual military-economic purpose" and, therefore, is a legitimate target for attack, might be applied, for example, to an unfortified Israeli kibbutz where attackers kill and injure children, burn houses and kidnap civilians. Is it now U.S. policy that such an attack would be legitimate?

Any sensible policy must meet the test of cost-benefit analysis: the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end.

- "Democracy" as US elites understand the term, an interpretation demonstrated clearly in the region. Its taken for granted that they have the right to conduct the analysis and pursue the project if it passes their tests. And it did pass their tests. In 1990.

Thomas Walker, one of the leading specialists on Central America observes:

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The voters chose a candidate of Washington's choice with a "gun held to their heads", as was clear to many impartial observers.

The major media celebrated the victory, entranced by the new "romantic age." Commentators accross the spectrum praised the success of the methods adopted to terrorize the popuation into submission.

If the election of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro as President last week reflected anything, it was the people's rejection of the pain they have endured for a decade. Give us a chance, they said. End the war. Save the economy.

Latin America's history is filled with government reversals, but rarely at the ballot box. Coups, revolutions and invasions -- often organized by Washington -- are more common means. Ever since the trauma of Viet Nam, the U.S. has sought a less direct and costly method to have its way. Where military force could still do the trick cost effectively, the U.S. was willing to use it, as in Grenada and Panama. But in Nicaragua, wittingly or not, Washington stumbled on an arm's-length policy: wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves. For Americans, the cost was minimal. True, bruising annual battles over Central America splintered Congress, and the Iran-contra scandal hobbled Ronald Reagan's second term, but hardly any U.S. soldiers were dying.

The real burden fell on Nicaragua. The U.S. strategy proved excruciatingly slow and extremely expensive, and it inflicted the most pain on the wrong people. The past ten years have savaged the country's civilians, not its comandantes. Since 1985 Washington has strangled Nicaraguan trade with an embargo. It has cut off Nicaragua's credit at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The contra war cost Managua tens of millions and left the country with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations and ruined farms. The impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua was a harrowing way to give the National Opposition Union (U.N.O.) a winning issue.

The New York Times, where Elaine Sciolino reviewed the U.S. reaction to the elections. The headline reads: "Americans United in Joy" at this outcome, "proud of this victory for US fair play". Such phrases as "United in Joy" are not entirely unknown. One might find them, perhaps, in the North Korean press.

Thomas Walker, points out that after a few years, the US terrorist war had reversed significant economic growth and social progress that followed the overthrow of the US backed Somoza dictatorship, driving the vulnerable economy to disaster and that:

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Nicaragua had dropped to the unenviable status of being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Reaganite scholar and the Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Thomas Carothers wrote the standard scholarly work on U.S. democracy promotion in Latin America in the 1980's.

He writes in part, from an insider's perspective, having served in Reagan's State Department during the 'democracy enhancement' programmes in Central America. He regards these programs as having been a systematic failure:

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The Reagan administration was trying to support the military governments that were on the way out if anything, the U.S. policy in that period worked against the democratic trend.

The underlying U.S. goal is maintaining the basic societal orders of particular Latin American countries approximately as they are-ensuring that the economics are not drastically rearranged and that the power relations of the various social sectors are not turned upside down. The underlying objective is to maintain the basic order of what, historically at least, are quite undemocratic societies.

The deep fear in the United States government of populist-based change in Latin America-with all its implications for upsetting established economic and political orders and heading off in a leftist direction- leads to an emphasis on incremental change from the top down.

The Reagan administration came to adopt prodemocracy policies as a means of relieving pressure for more radical change, but inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied.

The most important effect of the Reagan policy was the tremendous destruction it wreaked on Nicaragua ... Approximately 30,000 Nicaraguans were killed and tens of thousands others were wounded, a death total higher in per capita terms than that suffered by the United States in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. A generation of young Nicaraguans was devastated.

And just as importantly, diverted the energies of tens of thousands of young Nicaraguans away from productive economic activity. The war also wreaked havoc on the country's agricultural system, disrupting the production and distribution of food in many areas of the country. By the end of the 1980s Nicaragua was an economic disaster area and had sunk to being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere except for Haiti.

The CIA flooded the streets of California with Crack Cocaine to finance the Contra War after Congress cut off the funding. As Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton was heavily involved with importing cocaine produced by the Contras.

An August, 1996, series in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua's Sandinista government during the 1980s. Webb's series, "The Dark Alliance," has been the subject of intense media debate, and has focused attention on a foreign policy drug scandal that leaves many questions unanswered.

This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.

The CIA flooded the streets of California with Crack Cocaine to finance for the Contra War after Congress cut off the funding. As Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton was heavily involved with importing cocaine produced by the Contras in Nicaragua. The US is still heavily involved in drug trafficking. The drug war is bogus. It's a cover for US imperial activities.

An August, 1996, series in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua's Sandinista government during the 1980s. Webb's series, "The Dark Alliance," has been the subject of intense media debate, and has focused attention on a foreign policy drug scandal that leaves many questions unanswered.

This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.

Documentation of Official U.S. Knowledge ofDrug Trafficking and the Contras

The National Security Archive obtained the hand-written notebooks of Oliver North, the National Security Council aide who helped run the contra war and other Reagan administration covert operations, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in 1989. The notebooks, as well as declassified memos sent to North, record that North was repeatedly informed of contra ties to drug trafficking.

Evidence that NSC Staff Supported Using Drug Money to Fund the Contras

In 1987, the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, led by Senator John Kerry, launched an investigation of allegations arising from reports, more than a decade ago, of contra-drug links. One of the incidents examined by the "Kerry Committee" was an effort to divert drug money from a counternarcotics operation to the contra war.

On July 28, 1988, two DEA agents testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime regarding a sting operation conducted against the Medellin Cartel. The two agents said that in 1985 Oliver North had wanted to take $1.5 million in Cartel bribe money that was carried by a DEA informant and give it to the contras. DEA officials rejected the idea.

During his time with the CIA in the Reagan administration, Secratary of War Robert Gates critisized his superiors for their "half hearted policy" in destroying Nicaragua, advocated air strikes and a naval quarantine of its ports, and even invoked the "Monroe Doctrine", declaring the "Western Hemisphere" as being "the sphere of influence of the United States."

Robert Gates, the man nominated by President George W. Bush and President Barrack Obama to be US secretary of defense, recommended in the 1980s overt military action against Nicaragua, including air strikes and a naval quarantine of its ports. In earlier posts at top levels of the CIA, Gates figured in the Iran-Contra affair, in which he engaged in sins of omission if not commission, hesitating to make inquiries and pass warnings that might have headed off this abuse of power. As the CIA's top manager for intelligence analysis in the early 1980s he was accused of slanting intelligence to suit the predilections of the Reagan administration and his boss, Director William J. Casey.

In a "straight talk" memorandum to Casey, Robert Gates concedes that the CIA's paramilitary force, the Contras, cannot overthrow the Sandinista government. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine and the U.S. loss in Vietnam, Gates argues that the CIA-run Contra war is "an essentially half-hearted policy."

He recommends that the Reagan administration initiate a "comprehensive campaign openly aimed at bringing down the regime," including "the use of air strikes" against Nicaragua. "The fact is that the Western Hemisphere is the sphere of influence of the United States," Gates advises. "If we have decided totally to abandon the Monroe Doctrine … then we ought to save political capital in Washington, acknowledge our helplessness and stop wasting everybody's time."

Among the leading figures in the CIA-Contra War was John Negroponte, who ran the American embassy in Honduras that was the base for the terrorist attacks on Nicaragua. He also participated in efforts to get the Honduran government to support the Contras after Congress banned direct U.S. aid to the Paramilitaries. Negroponte's profile had risen with his appointments as ambassador to Iraq in 2004 and director of national intelligence in 2005. Then was chosen to to oversee the dimplomatic component of the current war on terror at the United Nations. "Death Squads Negroponte" now works along side Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While overseeing the Contra war, Negroponte covered up death squad atrocities by the US organized, trained, armed, funded, and advised Battalion 3-16 in Honduras.

As John Negroponte faced questioning about his activities in Honduras during the contra war, the National Security Archive posted additional documents from his chron file as ambassador. The documents, part of a large file of 470 cables obtained by the Washington Post through the FOIA, provide a virtual day-to-day record of Negroponte's unique tenure as ambassador, as he secured Honduran military, logistical and political support for the controversial CIA paramilitary campaign to overthrow the Sandinista government.

The 392 cables and memos record Negroponte's daily, and even hourly, activities as the powerful Ambassador to Honduras during the contra war in the early 1980s. They include dozens of cables in which the Ambassador sought to undermine regional peace efforts such as the Contadora initiative that ultimately won Costa Rican president Oscar Arias a Nobel Prize, as well as multiple reports of meetings and conversations with Honduran military officers who were instrumental in providing logistical support and infrastructure for CIA covert operations in support of the contras against Nicaragua -"our special project" as Negroponte refers to the contra war in the cable traffic.

Among the records are special back channel communications with then CIA director William Casey, including a recommendation to increase the number of arms being supplied to the leading contra force, the FDN in mid 1983, and advice on how to rewrite a Presidential finding on covert operations to overthrow the Sandinistas to make it more politically palatable to an increasingly uneasy U.S. Congress.

Conspicuously absent from the cable traffic, however, is reporting on human rights atrocities that were committed by the Honduran military and its secret police unit known as Battalion 316, between 1982 and 1984, under the military leadership of General Gustavo Alvarez, Negroponte's main liaison with the Honduran government. The Honduran human rights ombudsman later found that more than 50 people disappeared at the hands of the military during those years. But Negroponte's cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with General Alvarez, his deputies and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place.

In defiance of the Mafia-Don, Nicaraguans eventually reelected Daniel Ortega President of Nicaragua and a familiar pattern has returned.

Last May Hillary Clinton railed against "growing Iranian, Chinese and Russian influence in the Western Hemisphere,” which has ostensibly encouraged “leftist leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega to promote anti-U.S. sentiment and rely on aid from China, Iran and Russia.”

She particularly singled out Nicaragua, stating “We are looking to figure out how to deal with [President Daniel] Ortega” as “the Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua. You can only imagine what it’s for.”

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- For months, the reports percolated in Washington and other capitals. Iran was constructing a major beachhead in Nicaragua as part of a diplomatic push into Latin America, featuring huge investment deals, new embassies and even TV programming from the Islamic republic.

"The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in May. "And you can only imagine what that's for."

But here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.

Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing. Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce chief Ernesto Porta laughed and said: "It doesn't exist." Government officials say the U.S. Embassy complex is the only "mega-embassy" in Managua. A U.S. diplomat in Managua conceded: "There is no huge Iranian Embassy being built as far as we can tell."

There is no explanation as to why you can't rant in your own words in that post. Nor is there an explanation as to why you use dubious sources. Sure, you use a couple of legit files, but it doesn't mean that the others are legit.

The US turned Honduras into an instant colony in the early 1980s, a military base with thousands of American troops to support Death Squad operations in El Salvador and Guatemala, and, above all, to serve as a staging area, supply center, and refuge for the Contras and their terrorist war against Nicaragua.

The US campaign of terror in Central America was overseen by Reagan's Ambassedor to Honduras - John Negroponte who secured Honduran military, logistical and political support for the Death Squad operations.

Insamuch as the uninterrupted continuance of such operations in Honduras required and obediant and passive population, the US gave Honduran military and police the training, arms, equipment, and funds needed to efficiently suppress dissidents - the anti-American types (who mockingly refered to their country as the "USS Honduras"), those involved in the solidarity campaigns for the Salvadoran rebels and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and those striving for social change within Honduras.

Hundreds of Honduran citizens were kidnapped, tortured and killed in the 1980s by a secret army unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The intelligence unit, known as Battalion 316, used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves.

Newly declassified documents and other sources show that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder and torture, committed by Battalion 316, yet continued to collaborate closely with its leaders.

U.S. collaboration with Battalion 316 occurred at many levels.

* The CIA was instrumental in training and equipping Battalion 316. Members were flown to a secret location in the United States for training in surveillance and interrogation, and later were given CIA training at Honduran bases.

* Starting in 1981, the United States secretly provided funds for Argentine counterinsurgency experts to train anti-Communist forces in Honduras. By that time, Argentina was notorious for its own "Dirty War," which had left at least 10,000 dead or "disappeared" in the 1970s. Argentine and CIA instructors worked side by side training Battalion 316 members at a camp in Lepaterique, a town about 16 miles west of Tegucigalpa.

* Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who as chief of the Honduran armed forces personally directed Battalion 316, received strong U.S. support - even after he told a U.S. ambassador that he intended to use the Argentine method of eliminating subversives.

* By 1983, when Alvarez's oppressive methods were well known to the U.S. Embassy, the Reagan administration awarded him the Legion of Merit for "encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras." His friendship with Donald Winters, the CIA station chief in Honduras, was so close that when Winters adopted a child, he asked Alvarez to be the girl's godfather.

* A CIA officer based in the U.S. Embassy went frequently to a secret jail known as INDUMIL, where torture was conducted, and visited the cell of kidnap victim Ines Murillo. That jail and other Battalion 316 installations were off-limits to Honduran officials, including judges trying to find kidnap victims.

The exact number of people executed by Battalion 316 remains unknown. For years, unidentified and unclaimed bodies were found dumped in rural areas, along rivers and in citrus groves.

Late in 1993, the Honduran government listed 184 people as still missing and presumed dead. They are are called "desaparecidos," Spanish for "the disappeared." Mackay is the first person on the list to be found and identified. The discovery of an identifiable body has enabled prosecutors to try to bring his killers to justice.

Ambassedor Negroponte's support was fundemental to Battalion 3-16's slaughter of Honduran citizens.

The documents, part of a large file of 470 cables obtained by the Washington Post through the FOIA, provide a virtual day-to-day record of Negroponte's unique tenure as ambassador, as he secured Honduran military, logistical and political support for the controversial CIA paramilitary campaign to overthrow the Sandinista government.

Conspicuously absent from the cable traffic, however, is reporting on human rights atrocities that were committed by the Honduran military and its secret police unit known as Battalion 316, between 1982 and 1984, under the military leadership of General Gustavo Alvarez, Negroponte's main liaison with the Honduran government. The Honduran human rights ombudsman later found that more than 50 people disappeared at the hands of the military during those years. But Negroponte's cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with General Alvarez, his deputies and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place.

Furthermore, the Contras routinely used US military bases in Honduras to torture and execute prisoners.

These excerpts describe (1) the State Department-funded investigation in 1986 and 1987 that established repeated instances of the murder or torture of prisoners by the Nicaraguan contras based in Honduras (pp. 197-201); (2) the contra’s 1987 “counterintelligence” campaign within their own ranks, which included CIA polygraph experts as well as routine torture and indefinite detention while the contras’ CIA handlers “turned the other way” (pp. 194-195); and (3) Terry Ward’s role with the contras (pp. 222-223).

Negroponte's profile had risen during the Bush administration with his appointments as ambassador to Iraq in 2004 and director of national intelligence in 2005. Then was chosen to to oversee the dimplomatic component of the current war on terror at the United Nations. Negropente now works along side Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Just beginning with the 1990 election of Aristide (far too narrow a time frame), Washington was appalled by the election of a populist candidate with a grass-roots constituency just as it had been appalled by the prospect of the hemisphere's first free country on its doorstep two centuries earlier. Washington 's traditional allies in Haiti naturally agreed.

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The fear of democracy exists, by definitional necessity, in elite groups who monopolize economic and political power.

-Africology professor and renowned Haitian scholar Bellegarde-Smith observes in his perceptive history of Haiti ; whether in Haiti or the US or anywhere else.

The threat of democracy in Haiti in 1991 was even more ominous because of the favorable reaction of the international financial institutions (World Bank, IADB) to Aristide's programs, which awakened traditional concerns over the "virus" effect of successful independent development. These are familiar themes in international affairs: American independence aroused similar concerns among European leaders. The dangers are commonly perceived to be particularly grave in a country like Haiti , which had been ravaged by France and then reduced to utter misery by a century of US intervention. If even people in such dire circumstances can take their fate into their own hands, who knows what might happen elsewhere as the "contagion spreads."

The Bush I and Clinton administrations reacted to the disaster of democracy by shifting aid from the democratically elected government to what are called "democratic forces": the wealthy elites, and the business sectors, who, along with the murderers and torturers of the military and paramilitaries, had been lauded by the Bush II administration, in their Reaganite phase, for their progress in "democratic development," justifying lavish new aid. "The praise came in response to ratification by the Haitian people of a law granting Washington 's client killer and torturer Baby Doc Duvalier the authority to suspend the rights of any political party without reasons. The referendum passed by a majority of 99.98%."

The former leader of Haiti's most feared right-wing paramilitary group has confirmed that he was a paid agent of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1991 to 1994. His relationship with the C.I.A., he said, started shortly after a right-wing military junta overthrew Mr. Aristide in September 1991 .

It has already been reported that leaders of the junta were on the C.I.A.'s payroll from the mid-1980's until at least the early 1990's. It also has been reported that the agency had set up a Haitian intelligence service whose members attacked Mr. Aristide's supporters, as did Mr. Constant's paramilitary organization, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti.

The United States’ role in Haiti became the focus of controversy again this week with the release of classified documents showing U.S. ties to extremist right-wing groups during the 1991-94 reign of the military junta there.

Thousands of pages of newly declassified U.S. documents, received by the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), depict a U.S. government that understood the brutal nature of Haiti’s rightist opposition — but denied it in public.

‘’Obviously, they were talking out of both sides of their mouth,’’ CCR lawyer Michael Ratner said of the U.S. government.

‘’They were talking about restoring democracy to Haiti, but at the same time, they were undermining democracy in the coup period— at times supporting a group that committed terrorist acts against the Haitian people,’’ Ratner told IPS.

He contended that U.S. suspicions of Aristide’s leftist populism prodded them to seek support from even the most brutal anti-Aristide elements.

human rights groups blame FRAPH for the bulk of some 4,000 murders committed from Aristide’s ouster in a September, 1991, coup until his return with U.S. support in October, 1994.

Refugees fleeing to the US from the terror of the US-backed dictatorships were forcefully returned, in gross violation of international humanitarian law. The policy was reversed when a democratically elected government took office. Though the flow of refugees reduced to a trickle, they were mostly granted political asylum. Policy returned to normal when a military junta overthrew the Aristide government after seven months, and state terrorist atrocities rose to new heights.

It therefore marked a positive step towards democracy as compared with the 99% approval of a 1918 law granting US corporations the right to turn the country into a US plantation, passed by 5% of the population after the Haitian Parliament was disbanded at gunpoint by Wilson's Marines when it refused to accept this "progressive measure," essential for "economic development."

Their reaction to Baby Doc's encouraging progress towards democracy was characteristic - worldwide -- on the part of the visionaries who are now entrancing educated opinion with their dedication to bringing democracy to a suffering world - although, to be sure, their actual exploits are being tastefully rewritten to satisfy current needs.

The perpetrators were the army - the inheritors of the National Guard left by Wilson 's invaders to control the population - and its paramilitary forces. The most important of these, FRAPH, was founded by CIA asset Emmanuel Constant, who now lives happily in Queens, Clinton and Bush II having dismissed extradition requests -- because he would reveal US ties to the murderous junta, it is widely assumed. Constant's contributions to state terror were, after all, meager; merely prime responsibility for the murder of 4-5000 poor blacks.

Your Nov. 10 front-page article on the United States role in Haiti does not describe the Clinton administration's role in shielding the men who ruled and terrorized Haiti from 1991 to 1994.

United States troops patrolling Haiti in 1994 allowed most of the worst criminals to flee the country, but seized numerous records from the army and death squads, as well as photographs of torture sessions. Haitian prosecutors have spent five years trying to recover these materials. The United States now says it will not return the files unless it can first delete all references to American citizens.

Moreover, 16 high-ranking Haitian military officers have reportedly been allowed to live in the United States, among them Emmanuel Constant, the leader of a paramilitary group, who has bragged about receiving regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency.

Haitian-American leaders, outraged by the increasingly visible presence in Queens of a man accused of killing thousands in Haiti, are renewing a call to send the man back there for trial.

For more than five years, Emmanuel Constant, 43, the leader of a Haitian paramilitary group in the early 1990's, has lived intermittently with an aunt on a quiet street in southeast Queens since 1994, popping up at restaurants, coffee shops and nightclubs in Brooklyn and Queens and on Long Island.

His presence in the city has always angered Haitian exiles and human rights advocates who have tried to persuade the United States government to extradite him on murder charges.

Kate Doyle is right to say the release of documents showing American complicity in genocide in Guatemala should ''set a precedent.'' In Haiti, some of the best evidence about the junta that ruled from 1991 to 1994 is in 160,000 documents the United States seized during its 1994 intervention. But Washington, determined to avoid revelations on its intelligence links to the junta, refuses to give the documents back without removing all American names.

Also, Washington has given Emmanuel Constant, its paid intelligence informant and leader of Haiti's most vicious paramilitary group, refuge from Haitian prosecution, apparently on condition that he not speak about his American connection.

High-pitched wails and angry shouts pierced the damp quiet of a Queens neighborhood yesterday morning as about 30 people gathered at the home of a former paramilitary leader from Haiti to protest his presence in the United States.

A coalition of Haitian and human rights groups has tried to persuade the United States government to extradite Mr. Constant to Haiti for trial. And this is not the first such protest demanding his arrest.

Outrage at his presence in a heavily Caribbean neighborhood prompted the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain him for a year. He was abruptly released in 1996, raising suspicions that Mr. Constant, who has said he was a paid informer for the Central Intelligence Agency, struck a deal with the United States government: his freedom for his silence.

Pierre Florestal, 64, the host of a radio show on Radio Soleil d'Haiti, said Mr. Constant's life of relative impunity symbolized the way the United States had too often treated Haiti and its people. Without accountability for those who tortured, maimed, terrorized and then fled to exile, Mr. Florestal said, the victims could not heal.

Recall the core element of the Bush doctrine, which has "already become a de facto rule of international relations," Harvard's Graham Allison writes in Foreign Affairs:

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those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves.

- in the President Bush's words, and must be treated accordingly, by large-scale bombing and invasion.

When Aristide was overthrown by the 1991 coup, the Organization of American States declared an embargo. Bush I announced that the US would violate it by exempting US firms. He was thus "fine tuning" the embargo for the benefit of the suffering population.

Clinton authorized even more extreme violations of the embargo: US trade with the junta and its wealthy supporters sharply increased.

The crucial element of the embargo was, of course, oil. While the CIA solemnly testified to Congress that the junta "probably will be out of fuel and power very shortly" and "Our intelligence efforts are focused on detecting attempts to circumvent the embargo and monitoring its impact," Clinton secretly authorized the Texaco Oil Company to ship oil to the junta illegally, in violation of presidential directives.

The United States failed to take many steps that it had promised to choke the flow of money and goods to the Haitian dictators and their wealthy supporters.

According to documents and interviews with federal officials, investigators and targets of the sanctions, the U.S. government:

-- Never seized U.S. homes owned by coup supporters, despite a vow to the contrary.

-- Eroded its own embargo by buying baseballs and black-market gasoline from alleged backers of the regime and training military men who worked for it.

-- Subverted its own goals by granting embargo exemptions to U.S. companies and wealthy Haitians.

-- Delayed freezing Haitian leaders' assets for almost 15 months after the coup. By that time, the Bank of Boston found only 50.71 Haitian gourdes, worth about $5.07, in the accounts of Brig. Gen. Philippe Biamby, the Haitian army's chief of staff.

But more serious complaints - such as charges that Texaco distributed tankers of fuel - were allegedly left on the back burner.

Now the U.S. attorney's office and the General Accounting Office are examining the Texaco case and the handling of the embargo by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the little-known agency that enforces sanctions. Investigators want to know if OFAC - or some other agency - bowed to political or business pressures and deliberately avoided taking action against sanction violators.

OFAC says it administered the Haiti embargo "consistent" with instructions from the White House, the State Department and the National Security Council. It didn't run an airtight embargo, because it wasn't told to run an airtight embargo.

This remarkable revelation was the lead story on the AP wires the day before Clinton sent the Marines to "restore democracy," impossible to miss - I happened to be monitoring AP wires that day and saw it repeated prominently over and over -- and obviously of enormous significance for anyone who wanted to understand what was happening. It was suppressed with truly impressive discipline, though reported in industry journals along with scant mention buried in the business press.

THE ARISTIDE GOVERNMENT of Haiti has agreed to a structural readjustment plan which adapts the economic approach favored by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The plan appears to veer away from the more populist line President Jean-Bertrand Aristide took before being ousted in a 1991 army coup.

Under the August 22 plan, Haiti commits to eliminate the jobs of half of its civil servants, massively privatize public services, "drastic[ally]" slash tariffs and import restrictions, eschew price and foreign exchange controls, grant "emergency" aid to the export sector, enforce an "open foreign investment policy," create special corporate business courts "where the judges are more aware of the implications of their decisions for economic efficiency," rewrite its corporate laws, "limit the scope of state activity" and regulation, and diminish the power of President Aristide's executive branch in favor of the more conservative Parliament.

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as the "price" for [Aristide's] return the Clinton administration in conjunction with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund demanded then President Aristide sign agreements which continue a long U.S. tradition of pushing policies which undermining Haiti's national and Haitians' household food security. These neoliberal economic policies are an instant replay of the neoliberal export driven policies in Africa and Central America Food First discussed in our last News and Views and our last Backgrounder, "Anatomy of a Disaster."

Haiti is being asked to eliminate the jobs of half its civil servants, massively privatize public services, dramatically slash tariffs and import restrictions, get rid of price and foreign exchange controls, grant "emergency" aid to the export sector, reinforce an "open foreign investment policy," create special corporate courts where "judges are more aware of the implications of their decisions for economic efficiency," rewrite its corporate laws, limit the scope of state activity and regulation and diminish the power of the executive branch in favor of the traditionally more conservative Parliament.

an economic program guided by the United States, a program featuring private investments from the United States that would be drawn to Haiti by such incentives as no customs taxes, a minimum wage kept very low, the suppression of labor unions, and the right of American companies to repatriate their profits.

We call this "restoring democracy," a prime illustration of how US foreign policy has entered a "noble phase" with a "saintly glow," the national press explained.

Programs such as this, and a series of other World Bank and IMF initiatives, "tightened monetary policy" for the next fifteen years and dictated how and where Haiti would be allowed to spend Haitian funds. On the eve of Aristide's reelection in 2000, an IMF letter of intent dictated how the new government's social policy would be run. Haiti was not allowed to hire any additional civil servants and had to "abstain from granting wage increases" to government employees.

The IMF also mandated "spending on education relative to GDP" and insisted that Haiti would not be allowed to "impose restrictions on payments and transfers for international transactions." In other words, Haiti wasn't allowed to spend any money domestically without IMF approval and they had to open their borders to foreign goods without restriction. The Haitian population was kept alive because of the development loans that were dispensed, but they were unable to break free from their cycle of debt and dependency.

In a series of private meetings, Administration officials admonished Aristide to put aside the rhetoric of class warfare and seek instead to reconcile Haiti’s rich and poor. The Administration also urged Aristide to stick closely to free-market economics and to abide by the Caribbean nation’s constitution — which gives substantial political power to the Parliament while imposing tight limits on the presidency.

Administration officials have urged Aristide to reach out to some of his political opponents in setting up his new government to set up a broad-based coalition regime. The Administration has made it clear to Aristide that if he fails to reach a consensus with Parliament, the United States will not try to prop up his regime.

-Which is a threat of regime change or assassination if Aristide defied the Mafia-don by not adopting the program of the right wing and abide by the harsh neoliberal rules he agreed to follow as the condition for the US allowing him to return to office.

Not surprisingly, we are seeing the corporate sweatshop owners that Clinton and others had posited as the future stewards of Haiti’s economy fire their employees en masse and flee the country for safer environs instead of helping out.

The renovated state must focus on an economic strategy centered on the energy and initiative of Civil Society, especially the private sector, both national and foreign.

That has the merit of honesty: Haitian Civil Society includes the tiny rich elite and US corporations, but not the vast majority of the population, the peasants and slum-dwellers who had committed the grave sin of organizing to elect their own president.

World Bank officers explained that the neoliberal program would benefit the "more open, enlightened, business class" and foreign investors, but assured us that the program "is not going to hurt the poor to the extent it has in other countries" subjected to structural adjustment, because the Haitian poor already lacked minimal protection from proper economic policy, such as subsidies for basic goods. Aristide's Minister in charge of rural development and agrarian reform was not notified of the plans to be imposed on this largely peasant society, to be returned by "America 's good wishes" to the track from which it veered briefly after the regrettable democratic election in 1990. Matters then proceeded in their predictable course.

An export-driven trade and investment policy has the potential to relentlessly squeeze the domestic rice farmer. This farmer will be forced to adapt, or (s)he will disappear.

-With incidental benefits to US agribusiness and investors. Despite their extreme poverty, Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but cannot possibly compete with US agribusiness, even if it did not receive 40% of its profits from government subsidies, sharply increased under the Reaganites who are again in power, still producing enlightened rhetoric about the miracles of the market. We now read that Haiti cannot feed itself, another sign of a "failed state."

The IMF forced Haiti to open its market to imported, highly subsidized U.S. rice at the same time it prohibited Haiti from subsidizing its own farmers . Haitian farmers have been forced off their land to seek work in sweatshops, and people are poorer than ever.

From a grass-roots perspective in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, it seems undeniable that millions of people have been left behind in the rush to globalization. That much is evident from the distended stomachs of children in villages like Pont-Sonde, the throngs of women seeking jobs at 30 cents an hour in sweatshops owned by U.S. clothing manufacturers and the daily street demonstrations through the slums of Port-au-Prince by laid-off government employees.

A few small industries were still able to function, for example, making chicken parts. But US conglomerates have a large surplus of dark meat, and therefore demanded the right to dump their excess products in Haiti . They tried to do the same in Canada and Mexico too, but there illegal dumping could be barred. Not in Haiti , compelled to submit to efficient market principles by the US government and the corporations it serves.